Privacy Implications of Technology Innovation Processes

The focus of this study is on furthering our understanding of the relationship between technology and privacy by examining privacy concerns during the innovation process. We begin by exploring the techno-privacy relationship and what it is about technology that so concerns us. Dealing with privacy concerns of already developed and adopted technologies is difficult, and we propose that a focus early on as to how stakeholders deal with privacy concerns during the innovation process could be an effective strategy. We start our investigation by drawing on the work of Introna and Pouloudi (1999), whose principles of representation, access, and power aid the analysis of privacy concerns in the information age. We present a qualitative research case study that followed the efforts of three particular stakeholder groups in dealing with privacy concerns raised during a technology innovation process. The analysis provides empirical evidence for Introna and Pouloudi’s principles. We develop two further interrelated concepts, organizational image and timing, which our analysis suggests are specific to understanding how stakeholders deal with privacy during the innovation process

Resolving the Misalignment between Consumer Privacy Concerns and Ubiquitous IS Design: The Case of Usage-based Insurance

Ubiquitous IS enables novel services and business models, yet require a careful balancing of consumer privacy concerns (PC) – induced by the provision of particular sensors and information types – with functional performance in order to maximize acceptance. For the exemplary case of Usage-based Insurance (UBI), this paper presents a design science approach to the mitigation of PC under parallel consideration of functional system performance. Based on long-term location trajectories from 1’600 vehicles, we assess the predictive power of emulated system designs that substitute location information, presumably the most privacy sensitive type of information in current UBI designs. We find that there are substantial grounds to challenge prevalent design paradigms in UBI and infer general insights from this example for IS researchers and IT professionals, who, when seeking to improve system privacy, often focus on privacy-enhancing technologies instead of considering the socio-technical context of ubiquitous IS

Empirical Studies on Online Information Privacy Concerns: Literature Review and an Integrative Framework

In the e-commerce environment, individuals’ concerns for online information privacy play critical roles in determining their intention to use the Internet to provide personal information for services and transactions. Understanding this relationship has important implications for e-commerce. Despite much research in this area, an overarching picture of the relationship between information privacy concerns and the antecedent and consequence factors is yet to be drawn. Based on a review on empirical studies in this area, this research summarizes the conceptualizations of privacy concerns and the antecedents and consequences. An integrative framework is developed to illustrate the relationships between the factors. In this framework, a person’s concern for information privacy regarding a specific e-commerce website is distinguished from his/her concern for information privacy regarding the general e-commerce environment. These two forms of privacy concerns have distinct impacts on a person’s online behavior. Their relationships with multiple antecedent and consequence factors are analyzed